Make Way for the Infidels

The odyssey of Goldfinch: performers, in-laws, rule breakers.

Recently I met Aaron Stevens and Grace Sullivan of the Tacoma band Goldfinch for lunch. At their insistence, we didn’t eat at a restaurant. Instead, we grabbed takeout soup and walked downtown. Stevens said he knew a place where we could talk in private. Soon we entered a large church, and then a small,
dark chapel.

I didn’t know what we were going to talk about, or why it should be discussed so furtively. Stevens and Sullivan, who are in-laws as well as collaborators (Stevens is married to Sullivan’s sister), had only vaguely mentioned an “idea.”

I sat on a piano bench, Stevens in a pew and Sullivan at the foot of the altar. We ate soup. We talked about their recently released debut record Goldfinch, an indie folk-rock gem that has earned the band serious buzz. We talked about soup. We talked about everything except the idea. Finally, I had to know.

“So what’s the big idea?”

Photgraphy by Jason Ganwich

The explanation began with a history. I learned that Stevens’ father, a minister, was a closet homosexual and that Sullivan’s father, also an occasional preacher, was caught with child pornography. Until recently, both Stevens and Sullivan were tormented by their secrets, which they masked with religious conservatism. The mask started to come off in their mid-thirties. Only recently, through music and art, had they begun questioning the orthodoxy behind which they and their fathers once hid.

They didn’t hide anything in this conversation. It was as naked as I’d seen two people — until I actually saw them naked. The idea, it turns out, was for a series of highly symbolic nude photographs, an attempt to capture with images the painful openness of our conversation in the chapel, and, in so doing, to reinforce themes expressed in their music.

The central theme in their music is a search — for place, love and especially understanding. Both lyrically and sonically, the songs on Goldfinch are explorations, journeys through the woods at night. Stevens and Sullivan don’t sing so much as yearn, and arrangements are restrained, even tentative, like uncertain steps in the dark: the piano wanders, the guitar balks, drums limp. Characters in the songs come and go and seldom linger, incapable or unworthy of finding what they seek.

On Goldfinch, and especially onstage, Stevens and Sullivan seem amazed, like two mutes suddenly cured. It’s not an act; it’s Goldfinch. No artifice divides them from their growing audience. No armor protects them.

“We want to present ourselves as what we really are, vulnerable and weak and sad,” Stevens told me in the chapel. Only in the nude could they stand truly unmasked and unarmored, they had concluded.

Such a project would be just another day at the office for many artists. But for two in-laws with conservative Christian backgrounds — living, working and raising children in their hometown — it’s an insurrection. Goldfinch can count on a backlash. Hence the secrecy.

“We’re infidels,” says Sullivan.

Goldfinch is no stranger to controversy. Stevens and Sullivan spend long nights together, writing, arranging, rehearsing and recording. They travel to gigs up and down the West Coast. They sing intricate, intimate harmonies. Their bond is palpable and unusual, and some consider it sinful. They’ve been accused of having “an emotional affair,” if not in fact a physical one.

A promo they filmed recently for the Doe Bay Music Festival on Orcas Island showed them naked behind scraps of construction paper, mock-billing Doe Bay as a nudist event. The humorous ad caused a minor uproar. When Sullivan posted it on her Facebook page, it got several nasty responses. The phone started ringing.

“Eighty percent of people just thought it was funny,” says Sullivan. The other 20 percent thought it immoral.

“They don’t even know about the photographs,” says Stevens. “So that was a good icebreaker.”

It’s ice that the members of Goldfinch are certain needs breaking. They reject the idea that doubts, fears and desires should be buried in the name of outward piety; repression, experience has taught them, is poison.

As is intolerance. By baring it all — physically, artistically, emotionally and spiritually — they are challenging the crowd to throw stones.

“We don’t mean it as a negative reaction [to moralization],” maintains Stevens.

It’s an affirmative statement: We can take it.

Working with local photographer Jason Ganwich, Stevens and Sullivan self-choreographed dozens of breathtaking stills during a marathon shoot at Fulcrum Gallery in July. Inspired by the public nudes of Spencer Tunick and the kinetic sequences of Eadweard Muybridge, they smeared themselves with white paint and posed, often with props.

Religious symbolism dominates. In “Room for the Holy Spirit,” Stevens and Sullivan face the camera squarely; expressionless, they display an X-ray image of a human hand in the open space between them. In a sequence called “Communion,” they kneel on the floor with their arms tied behind their backs; their bound hands hold loaves, while their necks stretch futilely toward wineglasses. As the sequence progresses, the glasses tumble and shatter, the wine spills and Sullivan and Stevens lie prostrate, as if dead. In some shots they wear question marks on their chests.

“So much of the project is about our evolving relationship with religion, friends, community, Tacoma and art, and that is going to be a theme in the show as well,” says Sullivan.

Entitled Goldfinch: Hide, the one-night-only Fulcrum show promises to be one of the year’s most provocative. The photographs will haunt the white walls, accompanied by single-word prompts, and the band will play a set, presenting themselves — all of themselves — to fans and detractors alike.

“We’re middle-aged, or almost middle-aged, parents. We don’t exactly fit the rebel artist image,” said Sullivan recently over breakfast (at a restaurant).
“I’m having a colonoscopy tomorrow!” added Stevens.

With more uncomfortable scrutiny sure to come.